NE146, on Wed Oct 12, 2011 10:20 PM, said:
I guess I kind of find it interesting a lot of you guys sound like you're playing the game for the first time.

I guess I'm just old

Since you brought it up, here’s my history with this game (my brother MAME Offender would have a similar tale). The only reason I even know of this title is because there was a Pengo machine in the arcade at the bowling alley where we participated in a Saturday morning kid’s league back in the mid/late 80’s. Every week after bowling, we’d hang in the arcade for a while. The Pengo machine was kind of off the “main wall” of games, tucked in the corner. All kinds of newer machines would come and go from that arcade, but the Pengo must have belonged to the bowling alley, because I remember it being more or less a permanent fixture. If I ever dropped a single quarter in that machine back in those days, I don’t remember doing so—it just didn’t seem terribly interesting to me at the time. When you’re 10 years old with $2.50 in quarters to your name, each credit is precious, so I was sure to spend them all on the more “cutting edge” games that went through there: Ghosts and Goblins, Exciting Hour (aka Mat Mania), Altered Beast, Double Dragon, Ring King, and the like. Of course, by “cutting edge”, I simply mean “better graphics and sound”. (“Riiise from your graaaave.”)
The irony is, I had to get into my 30’s and get into MAME to realize that early 80’s games like Pengo—with their fast action and skill-testing gameplay—are 100 times more fun and rewarding than clunky late 80’s/early 90’s quarter suckers like Altered Beast. I honestly don’t know why I was so enamored by such games back then; I find so many of them unplayable nowadays (there are exceptions, of course). Just for a laugh I fired up Robocop the other day, because I used to play it at a local convenience store back when convenience stores had arcade games. Man, does that game ever suck the high hard one; I couldn’t stand it for more than 5 minutes. Yet, somehow, I thought it was awesome back in the day.
Edited by Cynicaster, Thu Oct 13, 2011 8:30 AM.